On QUF Blog: Answering “The Question”

On the Quaker Universalist Fellowship blog, I have added a post called “Answering ‘The Question’ .”

Many Friends share mutual bemusement over what they call The Question, namely: “What do Quakers believe?”

In his “Among Friends” column for the January 2012 issue of Friends Journal, Gabriel Ehri describes how he learned not to preface her answer with “a set of disclaimers [about not speaking for all Quakers]…kind of like the endless legalese licensing agreements we click

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A sweet metaphor…and one not so sweet

Two simple metaphors to enrich the meta-conversation about faith and practice across the boundaries of religious language.

In the first, Hystery on Plainly Pagan writes about why she “resists theism”:

For me, what some might call “God” is that which is both intimately real and even commonplace and wholly Other and Ineffable. If I use the word “God”, people think I mean what I do not mean.

The butterfly is pinned and people think I mean wings and legs

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Living in between

Note: I deleted an earlier version of this post (see comment on “Apology to Quaker Quaker and its host”).

In recent years I’ve been reading and corresponding with a whole spectrum of individual Quaker bloggers, folks who share, in their own posts and in their comments on each other’s posts, an on-going meta-conversation about Quaker faith and practice across the boundaries of religious language.

These Friends write about their efforts to do something highly peculiar: to self-identify as Evangelical

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Weeds (Part III)

Part I: The parable of the weeds in the field
Part II: Religion or belief
Part III: Wilderness and cultivation

Wilderness and cultivation

“Religion in its purest form is a vast work of poetry.” (Carse, 111)

The first draft of “Weeds” was one long post. It began with my reaction to Matthew’s version of the weeds in the field parable, proceeded immediately with those insights from James Carse which now comprise the second half

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Weeds (Part II)

Part I: The parable of the weeds in the field
Part II: Religion or belief
Part III: Wilderness and cultivation

Religion or belief

In Part I, I laid out a problem—really a faith challenge—presented to me by the parable of the weeds in the wheat field, as told and interpreted in the book of Matthew (13:24-30, 36-43). The significance of this parable for me is that it sets up an

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